


Grass and greenworld all together

by lotesse



Category: Ivanhoe - Walter Scott
Genre: Babies, Chivalry, F/M, Families of Choice, Friendship/Love, Gen, letter-writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-21
Updated: 2010-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-13 22:33:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ivanhoe/Rowena, Rebecca, Richard. Three small stories, before and after. Kidfic, letter-writing, ethical debates, chivalry, and families of choice and otherwise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grass and greenworld all together

1.

“Wilfred, I say you shall not!”

The shout belonged to a girl some eight years old, with long fair hair hanging in a messy braid down her back. Her gown was of fine stuff, but the fashion was rough and rustic and deeply out-of-step with the slashed sleeves and tippets that bedecked the Norman court. Her guardian kept her dressed in Saxon fashion, plain and powerful, as befitted her heritage.

She was standing in an open doorway, in a bright sunny open-windowed room into which the smells of approaching summer spilled. The boy she'd been in the process of berating had thought to escape her by fleeing the solar, but at the imperious tone of her voice he slunk back into the doorway, gawky and apologetic. He was not very good at holding his own against her – perhaps because he'd been carefully inculated by his father with an awareness of her descent and bloodline and innate superiority to himself.

He stood at the threshold, awkwardly toeing the rough board that demarcated her territory, unwilling to cross over completely and give himself into her power. Boy and girl were of similar age – he a handful of years older, but not so many as to create any great difference between them – but while she carried an air of certain authority well beyond her years, he was yet every inch the child: sunburnt from the surprising power of the waxing sun, fair hair tumbled in a graceless mop about his ears, freckles liberally dusting his snub nose. Only the dark brown eyes showed the promise of steel and sentiment, oddly fathomless and compelling in such a funny boyish face.

“That kerchief is still new! I bought the silk for it myself, with my rose-stone brooch, only a month since. You shall not spoil it.”

“But Rowena, I need your token if I'm to have any hope at all in the joust! I'm not as big or strong as Eamund or Teothic, and Feran has already gotten Ainsly to give him her sleeve. Without your help I'm finished!” Holding out his hand imploringly, Wilfred nevertheless did not release or loosen his grasp on the scrap of embroidered silk he'd pilfered from her chambers.

Haughtily, Rowena sniffed at him, “And what do I care if you're beaten in some silly game? You're not old enough to play at jousting, anyway. It'd serve you right to lose.”

Dropping his outstretched hand and his eyes in one motion, Wilfred took one hesitant step into the room. When he raised his eyes to her again, his face was open and earnest, quite without trace of youth or play. “I wanted to win it for you – if you'd have me as your champion.”

It was impossible to resist him when he was in this mood; the sweetness of his upturned face was altogether too much for gainsaying. “When have you not been my knight?” she asked him, and he blushed rosy-red.

“I know it's only a foolish game, Rowena – and none of it really matters, yet – but I hope someday to be a true knight, and I feel I ought to begin practicing now.”

“Did you think I wouldn't understand?”

“No,” he said, face radiant with something she had no name for. “I'll always trust you to understand.” Then the weather of his expression changed, and he said saucily, “I merely doubted you'd give me a fair enough favor, if I asked it of you.”

She laughed, and ran for him; he dodged back into the corridor, but not swiftly enough, and so she had him pinned, pressed back breathless and merry against the cool stones of Rotherwood. He let her hold him, making no move save to grin broadly at her, and she laughed again and cuffed his ear, sliding her hands through the short straight silk of his tawny hair. “You are too wicked to be a knight,” she told him. “Certainly, you are too wicked to be _my_ knight. But take your stolen favor and be gone with you – and try not to bring my handkerchief back torn or bloodstained.”

“I will,” he told her.

“You'll try,” she replied. “You always try. But it will come to no good all the same.”

 

2.

The ferry that carried King Richard Coeur-de-Lion of England across the Straights of the Bosporus was a low salt-blackened platform, pulled silently across still and noiseless waters in the dark of the night.

Three knights traveled with the king that night: his champions the Earl of Leicester and Sir Edwin Turneham, and a third, younger knight. This last was a pale-faced boy, his yellow hair strangely bright against the shadowed sobriety of his youthful countenance. His mail-clad shoulders were bent, and his fair head hung low with melancholy.

“How then, Knight of Ivanhoe?” said Richard softly, sitting beside him in a strangely noiseless motion, when all the mass of his panoply and person were considered. “Why so sad?”

“In truth, my liege,” Wilfred said, looking up with a face open and guileless before his sovereign, “I fear my mind yet resides in England.”

“Thy heart too, I vow, or I never saw nor knew love.”

Breaking the contact of their eyes, Wilfred sighed heavily, and his hands fell open to hang at his side, bereft of care. “You know my circumstances,” he said. “You know what words my father spoke to me, and why. How can you doubt that my heart lies behind us, and that I now travel on in the despite of its loss?”

“Yet be cheerful, my friend, and turn your mind to pursuits of valor.”

“And if my heart is too consumed by love to allow my mind any thought of war?”

“Wilfred,” the king said gently, “there is nothing thou cans't do to subvert the will of thy father. In regards to your inheritance, and in regards to the bestowal of his ward, Cedric the Saxon needs must rule absolute. But I will not allow thee to live penniless. Have I not already gifted thee with a fair barony, on which to found your own store and patrimony without your father's aid?”

Inclining his fair head respectfully, the young knight admitted, “It is true, sire, and I would not have you think me ungrateful.”

“No matter,” said Richard with a broad grin, the creases at the corners of his dark eyes throwing shadows out along the bones of his face. “It is the lady, and not the land, that has the greatest hold on thy heart. I know thee well enough not to think otherwise – never will Wilfred of Ivanhoe put his purse before his cares.”

“And my father, too – though I know it to be strange, after his anger and my defiance, that his displeasure should yet have any hold over me. But it does.”

“That, my Knight of Ivanhoe, is where thou'rt wrong. If thou hads't failed to mourn thy father, who is after all dead to thee, I should have loved thee less.” Richard's hand weighed heavy on his knight's shoulder, solid and powerful in the support it silently offered.

Wilfred's face did not appreciably lighten in expression, but what had been quiet sorrow shifted into solemn thought, more mature and less openly passionate. “The worst of it is,” he said with quiet wry resignation, “that I more than half agree with him. You people, my lord, have not been overly kind to my own in the hundred years in which you've held the upper hand in merry England. And now we leave a land already troubled, to go borrow trouble in Jerusalem. I am not entirely sure that our course is wise, nor just, nor virtuous. Chivalry and crusaderdom seem, to my mind, ill-matched in nature.”

A kingly eyebrow lifted. “You make your doubts very clear, Knight of Ivanhoe – perhaps clearer than you ought, considering to whom you speak. But, fortunately for thee, the strength of thy convictions placed thee highly in my estimation, and so I will not punish thee for speaking thy mind. You take your father's part, and think it well for half my kingdom to rise against me in active revolt?”

Wilfred shook his head, blond hair catching and throwing back the flickers of the torches that lit their passage. Smiling, he answered, “My king, I can see nothing but tragedy down that path. My father dreams too much of the past; I would live with my face turned always to the future.”

“A wise choice.”

“But,” Ivanhoe said, voice ringing with determination across the quiet still water, “I do not say that my father's understanding of English society is in any way incorrect. The Saxon people have lost too much; one day a reckoning will have to be made with their grievances.”

Richard looked out to the approaching shore, glancing surreptitiously at Ivanhoe's profile, limned in golden torchlight, with his hair gleaming like an aureole – but not meeting his eyes, or allowing him to see the direction of his gaze. “Perhaps you are right,” he said mildly. “When we return – we shall test these troubles then, Wilfred. When we return.”

 

3.

Rowena wrote the first letter – a polite missive, inquiring after the health and condition of Isaac of York and his daughter Rebecca. It was done out of no real intent or thought, reflexive rather than considered. The Saxon princess had seen something sad and sweet and of untellable value in the face of the lady who had offered her such love by proxy, something that moved her heart and intrigued her mind. And Wilfred cared for her as well – had risked much for her preservation – and would be happier in his spirit if she could offer him good news of Rebecca's fate.

The letter that she eventually received in return came from Spain, and was written on the light fine paper that could only be obtained there. Rebecca's handwriting was bold and decisive, with heavy thick downstrokes and precise and consistent spacing. She wrote that they were both well, that they had found a new house that was very beautiful, with an orange tree growing in the courtyard – and she asked after Rowena's health, but did not make mention of the Knight of Ivanhoe. But his name was written over every inch of the paper in letters of heart's blood and longing, and when Rowena wrote back she took care to include a great deal of news about her husband's doings.

After she'd written her reply, she gave Rebecca's letter to Wilfred, whose eyes softened as he read it over. “I am glad, i'faith, that she is well,” he said, and folded and put away the ink-marked pages.

No return correspondence arrived after that, and Rowena wondered if it were due to chosen isolation or merely prohibitive distance and expense that Rebecca severed the connection between them. Either way, it was her choice, and Rowena would abide by it.

The next letter that crossed the space between England and Spain was in Wilfred's hand, carried in the hands of none less than his faithful servant Gurth son of Beowulph, begging Rebecca for advice and for aid – the child Rowena carried was making her too ill for the preservation of either life, sapping her spirit and vitality, and in anguish for his wife Ivanhoe turned to Rebecca's deep knowledge of the healing arts. She sent back a sheaf of recipes to settle and nourish Rowena's body, and a glass pot containing an unguent that she promised would restore the lady's strength and allow her to properly support her unborn babe.

Ill-mannered though it was, Wilfred sent back no immediate reply, his entire attention occupied with his family. But after their daughter Joia was safely born, Rowena penned her a long newsy missive, full of affectionate descriptions of the baby and her adoring father. “He is absolutely besotted,” she wrote. “Indeed, sometimes I think he must have run mad. But when I look at her, and see his very eyes looking back at me from her little face, I cannot hold it against him. I would not have thought his eyes could be improved upon, until I saw them reproduced in her.”

Rebecca did not send a letter back, but a month later a Jewish traveler took hospitality at the barony of Ivanhoe, and left with them a tiny, gorgeous rattle of silver and bone, engraved about with delicate four-petaled blossoms. Rowena suspected that he wrote Rebecca privately after that, but as he did not tell her of it, she understood it to be his own affair and said nothing. She only hoped that he'd sufficiently articulated their gratitude.

It was a year since they heard again from Rebecca of York, and when they did so the word that came to their hall was verbal rather than written: a gossiping yeoman brimful of news of the impending nuptials of the beautiful daughter of Isaac the Jew, to a Moorish man of her own faith who was rich and wise, and a good man beside. The Te'naim engagement agreement had been signed, the ceremony was to take place three months hence, and by all accounts the lady was filled with joy.

Rowena could not travel to Spain – Joia was learning to walk and speak and understand, and with the rise in Wilfred's fortune came an attending rise in the demands on his wife's time and hospitality. But Ivanhoe found business of his king's to carry to the Spanish court, and so was present on Rebecca's wedding day. He carried to her a gift of beaten gold to encircle her wrists, and a sealed letter of great delicacy from Rowena, which happily congratulated Rebecca on her marriage and gently chattered about matters of bodily love in a way calculated to soothe and please.

Wilfred brought her back a candied orange and a silver bauble and a funny paper hat, and she divided the orange between the two of them, and tied the tinkling little bell into her hair, and put the funny hat on the baby, where it slipped down rakishly to cover one wide brown eye. That night they toasted the Lady Rebecca, and when she retired to her rooms to unpin her hair Rowena began writing her a new letter.


End file.
